This Week, We ‘Ave Mostly Been Playing… #9

It’s Friday, and therefore nearly the weekend. Rejoice!

Gamescom may have had us glued to our PC screens this week, with us desperately trying to devour every skerrick of information that trickles out, but we’ve still found time to just sit down and play.

Some of us have played new games, others have taken trips down memory lane, but we’ve all enjoyed ourselves nonetheless. So what have we played? Well, read on to find out.

Rich: I’ve had a busy week. Enjoyable, but busy. It has been made special by the fact that there’s currently a 75″ Samsung TV in the living room with all the bells and whistles. It has made playing games like Guacamelee! 2 and Yakuza Kiwami 2 an absolute pleasure; their colours bursting out of the screen and their bright lights blinding me in the early hours of the morning. It’ll be a shame when it goes.

Even without the TV though, Guacamelee! 2 and Yakuza Kiwami 2 are both brilliant games. I very much recommend that you check them out. I’ve also spent a lot of time with F1 2018. It’s a great game, but I don’t feel that it builds on F1 2017 quite enough to be essential. Now I’m tackling Tyler: Model 005, which isn’t impressing me much, and another game that can’t be mentioned just yet. Thankfully that one is quite fun.

Guacamelee! 2

Kim: This week has been a week of quickly dabbling in various games without much time to settle into anything big. I’ve played a little Fernz Gate, which seems like a quaint old-school JRPG that I’m looking forward to playing more of. I also had a go at Airport Simulator 2019, but it seems I’m not quite cut out for driving buses around runways. I also played more of Defenders of Ekron, a fun shmup-meets-adventure game, which I reviewed earlier this week.

I’ve dabbled with Detective Gallo on Switch, a fun point and click adventure about… a detective chicken. I’ll have more on that next week, which I’ve finished the thing. For now, I keep getting stuck – damn those obscure point and click puzzles.

Fernz Gate

Alec: I finally got round to picking up the remastered Uncharted trilogy and so, for the first time in the best part of a decade I’ve been playing Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Master restorers Bluepoint Studios have done a wonderful job with it; it’s the game you remember, just sharper, crisper and with some very pretty water effects. It’s also easy to forget that while its sequels improved virtually everything, Uncharted 1 is still a really good game, the characters are pretty much fully formed and, in the trademark mix of puzzles, platforming, and shooting, you can see the foundation for greatness.

The other thing I forgot is that there are some bits that are actually quite difficult. Admittedly, I’m playing it on hard for the first time, but I’ve died a decent amount and you really have to be precise with your shooting to avoid running out of bullets. Some unforgiving checkpointing also contributes to the game being punishing in a way I can’t remember Uncharted games being.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

Becca: This week I haven’t had much time to play much, but in the evenings I’ve been playing a few minutes here and there of Dead by Daylight. I normally only play as the killer but I decided to try as the survivor for a few rounds and I HATE IT. It’s too scary. Plus I died first both times. So after that I went back to killer once again.

I’ve been levelling up The Hag who I’ve come to really enjoy. Her ability allows her to place traps around the map and teleport to them if they’re triggered and you’re close enough. I often place traps near generators so that if a survivor walks past them I can hopefully teleport over there right away. That or I booby trap a survivor that I’ve already placed on a hook so when their fellow survivors come to save them they trigger the traps. Even though I’m late with the game it’s really easy to pick up and I’m having fun with it so far!

Dead By Daylight

Chris: This week I played and reviewed Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr which, despite the universe’s entertainingly grim mythos, turned out to be a rather average action RPG. I’ve also been kicking people out of clubs with Not Tonight, which borrows the Papers Please formula and transplants it into a post-Brexit dystopia. It’s a lot of fun but the fact it doesn’t so much as namecheck Papers Please doesn’t sit right with me.

As well as that, vehicle-based build-em-up Terratech has been taking up my time. I’ve made it my mission to build the most suspect-looking vehicle I can in the game’s creative mode, while also tackling the campaign. Though I’m faintly disappointed to discover there’s no online shared building mode; so battles between fleets of ArseTanks are out of the question.

Not Tonight

Jack: This second week of Battle for Azerothhas taken up even more of my time. There’s a mount that sells for around a million gold that you can farm with a group. I doubt I’ll ever see this mount in my bags, but as someone who pays for sub with gold right now that mount is worth about five months of subscription.

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth

Stan: Recently I’ve been getting lost in Breath of the Wild again. During my first play through I wanted to complete the game as quick as I could: to discover Link’s lost memories and save Hyrule once more. But this week I’ve not done any of the main quests since leaving the Great Plateau. I’ve been spending my time exploring, climbing to the nearest peak, and then exploring the next one in the distance. It’s such a fantastic game, one that’s so easy to get lost in… until the insanely strong black bokoblins punch-out my unprepared Link.

And speaking of punch-outs, I reviewed Pato Box this week – the closest thing around now to the great Punch Out. I was really taken by the design for Pato Box. It uses a black and white comic style visual, and even includes a mix of 2D and 3D areas to explore. There’s an over-the-top fun story, oh, and the protagonist is a boxer with a duck’s head. It’s a throwback to arcade style games, and a fun boxing adventure.